This isn't going to be easy. I'm not sure I can remain coherent long enough to say anything about this mission. The impulse is just to type endless strings of all the vile epithets I know. And I know some vile ones.

::takes deep breath, closes eyes, grips bridge of nose between thumb and forefinger, counts slowly to ten in Turkish::

This is the worst thing in HD2.

Note that I didn't say the worst mission. I don't consider this a mission at all.

Think about it. It's got none of the attributes of a mission. You have no choices of men or equipment. You have no control over your team or any tactical decisions to make. You don't get to move yourself around, let alone anyone else.

The only thing you get to do is operate a (badly) simulated machine gun and fire it at (badly) simulated targets. The only choices you get to make are which machine gun position to operate, and when to fire, and when to reload.

So that alone would be enough to forfeit all respect for this "mission" and to earn it the loathing of any real HD2 player. Because it takes the finest tactical military game on the market and reduces it to nothing but an arcade shooter - and a bad one at that.

It certainly isn't a combat flight simulation. I know a lot about those; I own and have played CFS2, Il-2 Sturmovik and Forgotten Battles, and even the old European Air War, not to mention weird stuff like Aces High. I've created campaigns for most of these and I've done damage and flight modeling for add-on airplanes.

And this isn't remotely in that class. Because, for one thing, the enemy aircraft aren't AIs. I've flown this piece of shit a lot of times and I've studied them; the same planes show up in the same places and make exactly the same moves, time and again - the only time they change behavior is if you get lucky and hit them, and then they always go down in the same way. You're shooting at the equivalent of a videotape. With today's technology, that's just inexcusably crude. Christ, the old Atari Battlezone was less predictable. And even Call of Duty is less blatantly scripted.

What you've got is the equivalent of a kiddie arcade game where you try to shoot down images of enemy planes (or space ships) on a screen. The kind that's deliberately designed to be hard to win, so you'll keep putting your quarters in.

And even at that level it isn't worth a damn. For one thing you can't really aim your weapon, because they've put in these God-damned bullshit muzzle flashes, bogus as the ones with which Oleg Maddox ruined Forgotten Battles; so once you pull the trigger you can no longer see what you're shooting at.

For another, the ballistics are modeled screwy. I know something about this, from my flight sim background, and I'm telling you they've got the gunnery all wrong. You can't do a proper deflection shot; the lead is completely incorrect.

Anyway, it hardly matters, since the damage modeling is so hopelessly off. It's damn near impossible to shoot those alleged Messerschmitts down with a head-on shot; you can put a burst into the nose at point-blank range and it just keeps coming. Now the Bf-109 was a particularly vulnerable plane from a frontal angle, because it had that big liquid-cooled engine which could easily be put out of action with a hit either to the engine itself or, better yet, the prominent radiators.

And I won't even go into the damage modeling of that Ju-88; enough to say that I've done damage modeling for combat flight sim airplanes, and this one is enough to make my teeth hurt.

The armament is wrong, too. The dorsal gun positions are more or less correct, but the Ju-88 should have a ventral gun firing to the rear and down, which this one doesn't; so you've only got two-thirds of the rearward firepower you should have, which is one reason they keep getting you.

(Or would be, if the AI gunners actually did anything. I don't believe they do. They shoot, sure, the idiot beside you fires continuously - helping blind you with his muzzle flash - and shouts out various exclamations, but you never see any actual effects. You never see a plane go down because he hit it; he'll yell out, "I got him!" or "That one's mine!" but the planes just keep on coming. The only time you'll see one go down smoking is if you hit it. I think the other gunners are just for atmosphere. More arcade shit.)

The fighters' armament is wrong too - for this period and place they should be 109Fs, with a single cannon and two machine guns in the nose - but that's just as well; if they had that cannon instead of those pissant wing machine guns you'd never get through this at all.

As for the flying, the behavior of the Messershitts is grotesque. They're supposed to be reasonably competent fighter jocks, yet they don't attack in a disciplined way; they just charge in, in no particular formation and with the worst possible tactics - every WWII fighter pilot knew that you don't attack a bomber from dead astern, it's much too dangerous - and get in each other's way and engage in pointless maneuvers, and half the time they don't even shoot because it's not in the script.

Besides, their performance is impossible. The Ju-88 was a damn fast plane for a twin-engine medium bomber; the Germans later used it as a fighter in fact. It was slower than the Bf-109, of course, but not that much slower; those fighters shouldn't be able to overhaul it and zoom past it as fast as they do.

(I suspect we're seeing movie shit here; some of the sequences remind me of movies like Memphis Belle and Twelve O'Clock High. But the Ju-88 was much faster than a B-17.)

I'll say this much, and only this much, in favor of this "mission": the graphics are beautifully rendered. The Ju-88 is a very fine-looking model in exterior view; we're a long way from those embarrassing airplanoid contraptions in HD.

And the scenery is splendid too; if you get a chance to look around, there are breathtaking views of the canyon, with its big fast-flowing river and broad pools and waterfalls and other features we all associate with the Libyan desert....

In every other respect, though, it is an outrage and an insult. The mission itself is totally inappropriate for this game; HD2 is supposed to be a tactical combat game, not a flight sim of which there are already plenty on the market. And it's not even well done, in any respect but that of graphics.

In fact, on top of everything else, it doesn't even work worth a damn; it's as buggy as an ant farm. Quite often the game crashes to desktop, something that I've never seen in any other mission in HD2; or, now and then, it simply locks up your computer so that you can't even get to your desktop, and you have to do a power-button reboot.

There's no doubt that it's a bug; it happens only at certain points in the "mission." Usually one just before the end, adding yet another frustration: if you get through without the plane crashing, the computer does. I finally learned to spot the place where it happens, and save just before that point, and then keep reloading until it managed to complete. I recommend you do this too if you have this problem.

I said I hated the second mission in the campaign, and I do; but there's hate and there's hate. The second mission was to hate the way you hate having somebody piss on your foot; this one is more like somebody pissing on your face.

As for the walkthrough, there is no walkthrough; there's nothing to say except keep shooting at the damn stupid phony airplanes on the damn stupid phony arcade screen and try to get the right ones. After you've run it a few times (and you probably will, it's very difficult in Hard mode) you'll learn that there are certain places where you get shot down in certain ways by certain planes, and if you don't get those particular planes - and you have to do it, the others won't - then you're going down, in one of a very limited number of possible crash scenes, collect the set.

What fun. Well, get the God-damned thing over with and let's move on. The next one is stupid too, but not nearly as bad as this. In fact that's the other thing you can say for C2M6: it makes C3 look a lot better.